Cipriani's Innocent Captive
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‘That’s right.’ She was disconcerted at how quickly he had reached the right conclusions.
‘So the loss of your job at my company would presumably have a serious impact on your finances.’
‘I would find another job to take its place.’
‘Look around the market, Miss Brennan. Well paid part-time work is thin on the ground. I make it my duty to pay my employees over the odds. I find that tends to engender commitment and loyalty to the company. You’d be hard pressed to find the equivalent anywhere in London.’
Lucas had planned on a simple solution to this unexpected problem. Now, he was pressed to find out a bit more about her. As a part-time worker, it seemed she contributed beyond the call of duty, and both the people she answered to within the company and external clients couldn’t praise her enough. She’d pleaded her innocence, and he wasn’t gullible enough to wipe the slate clean, but a more detailed hearing might be in order. His initial impressions weren’t of a thief who might be attracted to the lure of insider trading but, on the other hand, someone with a part-time job might find it irresistible to take advantage of an unexpected opportunity, and Duncan Powell represented that unexpected opportunity.
‘Money doesn’t mean that much to me, Mr Cipriani.’ Katy was confused as to how a man whose values were so different from hers could make her go hot and cold and draw her attention in a way that left her feeling helpless and exposed. She was finding it hard to string simple sentences together. ‘I have a place to myself but, if I had to share with other people, then it wouldn’t be the end of the world.’
The thought of sharing space with a bunch of strangers was only slightly less appalling to Lucas than incarceration with the key thrown away.
Besides, how much did she mean that? he wondered with grim practicality, dark eyes drifting over her full, stubborn mouth and challenging angle of her head. What had been behind that situation with Powell, a married man? It wasn’t often that Lucas found himself questioning his own judgements but in this instance he did wonder whether it was just a simple tale of a woman who had been prepared to overlook the fact that her lover was a married man because of the financial benefits he could bring to the table. Although, he’d seen enough of that to know that it was the oldest story in the world.
Maybe he would test the waters and see what came out in the wash. If this had been a case of hire and fire, then she would have been clearing out her desk eighteen hours ago, but it wasn’t, because he couldn’t sack her just yet, and it paid to know your quarry. He would not allow any misjudgements to wreck his deal.
‘You never thought about packing in the teaching and taking up the job at my company full time?’
‘No.’ The silence stretched between them while Katy frantically tried to work out where this sudden interest was leading. ‘Some people aren’t motivated by money.’ She finally broke the silence because she was beginning to perspire with discomfort. ‘I wasn’t raised to put any value on material things.’
‘Interesting. Unique.’
‘Maybe in your world, Mr Cipriani.’
‘Money, Miss Brennan, is the engine that makes everything go, and not just in my world. In everyone’s world. The best things in life are not, as rumour would have it, free.’
‘Maybe not for you,’ Katy said with frank disapproval. She knew that she was treading on thin ice. She sensed that Lucas Cipriani was not a man who enjoyed other people airing too many contradictory opinions. He’d hauled her in to sack her and was now subjecting her to the Spanish Inquisition because he was cold, arrogant and because he could.
But what was the point of tiptoeing around him when she was on her way out for a crime she hadn’t committed?
‘That’s why you don’t believe what I’m saying,’ she expanded. ‘That’s why you don’t trust me. You probably don’t trust anyone, which is sad, when you think about it. I’d hate to go through life never knowing my friends from my enemies. When your whole world is about money, then you lose sight of the things that really matter.’
Lucas’s lips thinned disapprovingly at her directness. She was right when she said that he didn’t trust anyone but that was exactly the way he liked it.
‘Let me be perfectly clear with you, Miss Brennan.’ He leaned forward and looked at her coolly. ‘You haven’t been brought here for a candid exchange of views. I appreciate you are probably tense and nervous, which is doubtless why you’re cavalier about overstepping the mark, but I suggest it’s time to get down from your moral high ground and take a long, hard look at the choices you have made that have landed you in my office.’
Katy flushed. ‘I made a mistake with Duncan,’ she muttered. ‘We all make mistakes.’
‘You slept with a married man,’ Lucas corrected her bluntly, startling her with the revelation that he’d discovered what he clearly thought was the whole, shameful truth. ‘So, while you’re waxing lyrical about my tragic, money-orientated life, you might want to consider that, whatever the extent of my greed and arrogance, I would no more sleep with a married woman than I would jump into the ocean with anchors secured to my feet.’
‘I...’
Lucas held up one hand. ‘No one speaks to me the way you do.’ He felt a twinge of discomfort because that one sentence seemed to prove the arrogance of which he had been accused. Since when had he become so pompous? He scowled. ‘I’ve done the maths, Miss Brennan and, however much you look at me with those big, green eyes, I should tell you that taking the word of an adulterer is something of a tall order.’
Buffeted by Lucas’s freezing contempt and outrageous accusations, Katy rose on shaky legs to direct the full force of her anger at him.
‘How dare you?’ But even in the midst of her anger she was swamped by the oddest sensation of vulnerability as his dark eyes swept coolly over her, electrifying every inch of her heated body.
‘With remarkable ease.’ Lucas didn’t bat an eyelid. ‘I’m staring the facts in the face and the facts are telling me a very clear story. You want me to believe that you have nothing to do with the man. Unfortunately, your lack of principles in having anything to do with him in the first place tells a tale of its own.’
The colour had drained away from her face. She hated this man. She didn’t think it would be possible to hate anyone more.
‘I don’t have to stay here and listen to this.’ But uneasily she was aware that, without her laying bare her sex life, understandably he would have jumped to the wrong conclusions. Without her confession that she had never slept with Duncan, he would have assumed the obvious. Girls her age had flings and slept with men. Maybe he would be persuaded into believing her if she told him the truth, which was that she had ended their brief relationship as soon as she had found out about his wife and kids. But even if he believed that he certainly wouldn’t believe that she hadn’t slept with the man.
Which would lead to a whole other conversation and it was one she had no intention of having. How would a man like Lucas Cipriani believe that the hussy who slept with married guys was in fact a virgin?
Even Katy didn’t like thinking about that. She had never had the urge to rush into sex. Her parents hadn’t stamped their values on her but the drip, drip, drip of their gentle advice, and the example she had seen on the doorstep of the vicarage of broken-hearted, often pregnant young girls abandoned by men they had fallen for, had made her realise that when it came to love it paid to be careful.
In fairness, had temptation knocked on the door, then perhaps she might have questioned her old-fashioned take on sex but, whilst she had always got along just fine with the opposite sex, no one had ever grabbed her attention until Duncan had come along with his charm, his overblown flattery and his persistence. She had been unsure of where her future lay, and in that brief window of uncertainty and apprehension he had burrowed in and stolen her heart. She had been ripe for the picking and his betrayal had been devastating.
Her virginity was a millstone now, a reminder of the biggest mistake she had ever made. Whilst she hoped that one day she would find the guy for her, she was resigned to the possibility that she might never do so, because somehow she was just out of sync with men and what they wanted.
They wanted sex, first and foremost. To get to the prince, you seemed to have to sleep with hundreds of frogs, and there was no way she would do that. The thought that she might have slept with one frog was bad enough.
So what would Lucas Cipriani make of her story?
She pictured the sneer on his face and shuddered.
Disturbed at the direction of her thoughts, she tilted her chin and looked at him with equal cool. ‘I expect, after all this, I’m being given the sack and that Personnel will be in touch—so there can’t be any reason for me to still be here. And you can’t stop me leaving. You’ll just have to trust me that I won’t be saying anything to anyone about your deal.’
CHAPTER TWO
SHE DIDN’T GET FAR.
‘You leave this office, Miss Brennan, and regrettably I will have to commence legal proceedings against you on the assumption that you have used insider information to adversely influence the outcome of my company’s business dealings.’
Katy stopped and slowly turned to look at him.
His dark eyes were flat, hard and expressionless and he was looking right back at her with just the mildest of interest. His absolute calm was what informed her that he wasn’t cracking some kind of sick joke at her expense.
Katy knew a lot about the workings of computers. She could create programs that no one else could and was downright gifted when it came to sorting out the nuts and bolts of intricate problems when those programs began to get a little temperamental. It was why she had been carefully headhunted by Lucas’s company and why they’d so willingly accommodated her request for a part-time job only.
In the field of advanced technology, she was reasonably well-known.
She didn’t, however, know a thing about law. What was he going on about? She didn’t really understand what he was saying but she understood enough to know that it was a threat.
Lucas watched the colour flood her face. Her skin was satiny smooth and flawless. She had the burnished copper-coloured hair of a redhead, yet her creamy complexion was free of any corresponding freckles. The net result was an unusual, absurdly striking prettiness that was all the more dramatic because she seemed so unaware of it.
But then, his cynical brain told him, she was hardly a shrinking violet with no clue of her pulling power, because she had had an affair with a married guy with kids.
He wondered whether she thought that she could turn those wide, emerald-green eyes on him and get away scot-free.
If she did, then she had no idea with whom she was dealing. He’d had a lifetime’s worth of training when it came to spotting women who felt that their looks were a passport to getting whatever they wanted. He’d spent his formative years watching them do their numbers on his father. This woman might not be an airhead like them, but she was still driven by the sort of emotionalism he steered well clear of.
‘Of course—’ he shrugged ‘—my deal would be blown sky-high out of the water, but have you any idea how much damage you would do to yourself in the process? Litigation is something that takes its time. Naturally, your services would be no longer required at my company and your pay would cease immediately. And then there would be the small question of your legal costs. Considerable.’
Her expression was easy to read and Lucas found that he was enjoying the show.
‘That’s—that’s ridiculous,’ Katy stuttered. ‘You’d find out that I haven’t been in touch with...with Duncan for years. In fact, since we broke up. Plus, you’d also find out that I haven’t breathed a word about the Chinese deal to...well, to anybody.’
‘I only have your word for it. Like I said, discovering whether you’re telling the truth or not would take time, and all the while you would naturally be without a penny to your name, defending your reputation against the juggernaut of my company’s legal department.’
‘I have another job.’
‘And we’ve already established that teaching won’t pay the rent. And who knows how willing a school would be to employ someone with a potential criminal record?’
Katy flushed. Bit by bit, he was trapping her in a corner and, with a feeling of surrendering to the inexorable advance of a steamroller, she finally said, ‘What do you want me to do?’
Lucas stood up and strolled towards the wall of glass that separated him from the city below, before turning to look at her thoughtfully.
‘I told you that this was not a straightforward situation, Miss Brennan. I meant it. It isn’t a simple case of throwing you out of my company when you can hurt me with privileged information.’ He paced the enormous office, obliging her to follow his progress, and all the time she found herself thinking, he’s almost too beautiful to bear looking at. He was very tall and very lean, and somehow the finely cut, expensive suit did little to conceal something raw and elemental in his physique.
She had to keep dragging her brain back to what he was telling her. She had to keep frowning so that she could give the appearance of not looking like a complete nitwit. She didn’t like the man, but did he have this effect on all the women he met?
She wondered what sort of women he met anyway, and then chastised herself for losing the thread when her future was at stake.
‘The deal is near completion and a fortnight at most should see a satisfactory conclusion. Now, let’s just say that I believe you when you tell me that you haven’t been gossiping with your boyfriend...’
‘I told you that Duncan and I haven’t spoken for years! And, for your information, we broke up because I found out that he was married. I’m not the sort of person who would ever dream of going out with a married guy—!’
Lucas stopped her in mid-speech. ‘Not interested. All I’m interested in is how this situation is dealt with satisfactorily for me. As far as I am concerned, you could spend all your free time hopping in and out of beds with married men.’
Katy opened her mouth and then thought better of defending herself, because it wasn’t going to get her anywhere. He seemed ready to hand down her sentence.
‘It is imperative that any sensitive information you may have acquired is not shared, and the only way that that can be achieved is if you are incommunicado to the outside world. Ergo that is how it is going to be for the next fortnight, until my deal is concluded.’
‘Sorry, Mr Cipriani, but I’m not following you.’
‘Which bit, exactly, Miss Brennan, are you not following?’
‘The fortnight bit. What are you talking about?’
‘It’s crystal clear, Miss Brennan. You’re not going to be talking to anyone, and I mean anyone, for the next two weeks until I have all the signatures right where I want them, at which point you may or may not return to your desk in Shoreditch and we can both forget that this unfortunate business ever happened. Can I get any clearer than that? And by “incommunicado”, I mean no mobile phone and no computer. To be blunt, you will be under watch until you can no longer be a danger to me.’
‘But you can’t be serious!’
‘Do I look as though I’m doing a stand-up routine?’
No, he didn’t. In fact, without her even realising it, he had been pacing the office in ever decreasing circles and he was now towering right in front of her; the last thing he resembled was a man doing a stand-up routine.
Indeed, he looked about as humorous as an executioner; she quailed inside.
Mentally, she added ‘bully’ to the growing list of things she loathed about him.
‘Under watch? What does that even mean? You can’t just...just kidnap me for weeks on end because you have a deal to complete! That’s a crime!’
‘Incendiary words, Miss Brennan.’ He leaned over and placed both hands on either side of her chair, caging her in so that she automatically cringed back. The power of his personality was so suffocating that she had to make an effort to remember how to breathe. ‘I won’t be kidnapping you. Far from it. You can walk out of here, but you know the consequences of that if you do. The simple process of consulting a lawyer would start racking up bills you could ill afford, I’m sure. Not to mention the whiff of unemployability that would be attached to you at the end of the long-winded and costly business. I am an extremely powerful man, for my sins. Please do us both a favour by not crossing me.’
‘Arrogant.’ Katy’s green eyes narrowed in a display of bravado she was inwardly far from feeling. ‘That’s what you are, Mr Cipriani! You’re an arrogant, domineering bully!’ She collided with eyes that burned with the heat of molten lava, and for a terrifying moment her anger was eclipsed by a dragging sensation that made her breathing sluggish and laborious.
Lucas’s eyes drifted to her full lips and for a second he was overwhelmed by a powerful, crazy urge to crush them under his mouth. He drew back, straightened and resumed his seat behind his desk.
‘I’m guessing that you’re beginning to see sense,’ he commented drily.
‘It’s not ethical,’ Katy muttered under her breath. She eyed him with mutinous hostility.
‘It’s perfectly ethical, if a little unusual, but then again I’ve never been in the position of harbouring suspicions about the loyalties of any of my employees before. I pay them way above market price and that usually works. This is a first for me, Miss Brennan.’
‘I can’t just be kept under watch for two weeks. I’m not a specimen in a jam jar! Plus, I have responsibilities at the school!’
‘And a simple phone call should sort that out. If you want, I can handle the call myself. You just need to inform them that personal circumstances will prevent you from attending for the next fortnight. Same goes for any relatives, boyfriends and random pets that might need sorting out.’
‘I can’t believe this is happening. How is it going to work?’
‘It’s simple.’ He leaned forward, the very essence of practicality. ‘You will be accommodated without benefit of your phone or personal computer for a fortnight. You can consider it a pleasant holiday without the nuisance of having your time interrupted by gadgets.’
‘A pleasant holiday?’ Her breathing was ragged and her imagination, released to run wild, was coming up with all sorts of giddying scenarios.
Lucas had the grace to flush before shrugging. ‘I assure you that your accommodation will be of the highest quality. All you need bring with you are your clothes. You will be permitted to return to your house or flat, or wherever it is you live, so that you can pack what you need.’
‘Where on earth will I be going? This is mad.’
‘I’ve put the alternative on the table.’ Lucas shrugged elegantly.
‘But where will I be put?’
‘To be decided. There are a number of options. Suffice to say that you won’t need to bring winter gear.’ In truth, he hadn’t given this a great deal of thought. His plan had been to delegate to someone else the responsibility of babysitting the headache that had arisen.
Now, however, babysitting her himself was looking good.
Why send a boy to do a man’s job? She was lippy, argumentative, stubborn, in short as unpredictable as a keg of dynamite, and he couldn’t trust any of his guys to know how to handle her.
She was also dangerously pretty and had no qualms when it came to having fun with a married guy. She said otherwise, but the jury was out on that one.
Dangerously pretty, rebellious and lacking in a moral compass was a recipe for disaster. Lucas looked at her with veiled, brooding speculation. He frankly couldn’t think of anyone who would be able to handle this. He had planned to disappear for a week or so to consolidate the finer details of the deal, without fear of constant interruption, and this had become even more pressing since the breach in security. He could easily kill two birds with one stone, rather than delegating the job and then wasting his time wondering whether the task would go belly up.
‘So, to cut to the chase, Miss Brennan...’ He buzzed and was connected through to his PA. In a fog of sick confusion, and with the distinct feeling of being chucked into a tumble drier with the cycle turned to maximum spin, Katy was aware of him instructing the woman who had escorted her to his office to join them in fifteen minutes.
‘Yes?’ she said weakly.
‘Vicky, my secretary, is going to accompany you back to...wherever you live...and she will supervise your immediate packing of clothes to take with you. Likewise, she will oversee whatever phone calls you feel you have to make to your friends. Needless to say, these will have to be cleared with her.’
‘This is ridiculous. I feel as though I’m starring in a low-grade spy movie.’
‘Don’t be dramatic, Miss Brennan. I’m taking some simple precautions to safeguard my business interests. Carrying on; once you have your bags packed and you’ve made a couple of calls, you will be chauffeured back here.’
‘Can I ask you something?’
‘Feel free.’
‘Are you always this...cold?’
‘Are you always this outspoken?’ Eyes as black as night clashed with emerald-green. Katy felt something shiver inside her and suddenly, inexplicably, she was aware of her body in a way she had never been in her life before. It felt heavy yet acutely sensitive, tingly and hot, aching as though her limbs had turned to lead.
Her mouth went dry and for a few seconds her mind actually went completely blank. ‘I think that, if I have something to say, then why shouldn’t I? As long as I’m not being offensive to anyone, we’re all entitled to our opinions.’ She paused and tilted her chin at a challenging angle. ‘To answer your question.’
Lucas grunted. Not even the high-powered women who entered and exited his life made a habit of disagreeing with him, and they certainly never criticised. No one did.
‘And to answer yours,’ he said coolly, ‘I’m cold when the occasion demands. You’re not here on a social visit. You’re here because a situation has arisen that requires to be dealt with and you’re the root cause of the situation. Trust me, Miss Brennan, I’m the opposite of cold, given the right circumstances.’
And then he smiled, a long, slow, lazy smile and her senses shot into frantic overdrive. She licked her lips and her body stiffened as she leant forward in the chair, clutching the sides like a drowning person clutches a lifebelt.
That smile.
It seemed to insinuate into parts of her that she hadn’t known existed, and it took a lot of effort actually to remember that the man was frankly insulting her and that sexy smile was not directed at her. Whoever he was thinking of—his current girlfriend, no doubt—had instigated that smile.
Were he to direct a smile at her, it would probably turn her to stone.
‘So you stuff me away somewhere...’ She finally found her voice and thankfully sounded as composed as he did. ‘On a two week holiday, probably with those bodyguards of yours who brought me from the office, where I won’t be allowed to do anything at all because I’ll be minus my mobile phone and minus my computer. And, when you’re done with your deal, you might just pop back and collect me, provided I’ve survived the experience.’
Lucas clicked his tongue impatiently. ‘There’s no need to be so dramatic.’ He raked his fingers through his hair and debated whether he should have taken a slightly different approach.
Nope. He had taken the only possible approach. It just so happened that he was dealing with someone whose feet were not planted on the ground the way his were.
‘The bodyguards won’t be there.’
‘No, I suppose it would be a little chancy to stuff me away with men I don’t know. Not that it’ll make a scrap of difference whether your henchmen are male or female. I’ll still be locked away like a prisoner in a cell with the key thrown away.’